“Just think, Bob,” said Betty, as she and Bob went out to the barn (they had been told that they were free to go anywhere), “there’s no running water in the house. Mrs. Watterby carries in every bit that’s used for drinking and washing. She was up at four o’clock this morning, carrying water to fill the tubs; she is doing the washing now.”
“Water’s as hard as a rock, too,” commented Bob. “I suppose that’s the alkali. Did you notice how harsh and dry Mrs. Watterby’s face looks? Seems to me I’d rather drill for water than for oil, and the first thing I’d do would be to pump a line into the house. They’ve lived on this farm for sixty years, your uncle said. At least Grandma Watterby has. And I don’t believe they’ve done one thing to it, that could be called an improvement.”
“Here’s the Indian,” whispered Betty. “Make him talk, Bob. I like to hear him.”
The Indian had eaten at the same table with the family, after the farm fashion, and Betty had been fascinated by the monosyllabic replies he had given to questions asked him. He was patching a harness in the doorway of the barn and glanced up unsmilingly at them. Nevertheless he did not seem hostile or unfriendly.
“You come to see oil fields?” he asked unexpectedly. “You help uncle own big well, yes? Indians know about oil hundreds of years ago.”
“Uncle Dick is working for a big oil company,” explained Betty. “I don’t think he owns any wells himself. Tell us something about the Indians? Are there many around here?”
There was an old sawhorse beside the door, and she sat down comfortably on that, while Bob, picking up a handy stick of wood, drew a knife from his pocket and began to whittle.
The Indian was silent for a few minutes. Then he spoke slowly, his needle stabbing the heavy leather at regular intervals.
“Wherever there is oil, there were Indians once,” he announced. “Ask any oil man and he will tell you. At Lake Erie, in Pennsylvania and some parts of New York State, where dwelt the Iroquois, many years after oil was found. It is true, for I have read and heard it.”
“Were the Iroquois in New York State?” asked Bob interestedly. “I’ve always read of the Mohawks, but not about them.”
The Indian glanced at him gravely.
“The Mohawks were an Iroquois tribe,” he explained courteously. “Mohawks, Senecas, Tionontati, Cayuga, Oneida—all were tribes of the Iroquois. Yes I see you recognize those names—many places in this country have been named for Indians.”
“Are you an Iroquois?” asked Betty, rather timidly, for she feared lest the question should be considered impolite.
“I am a Kiowa,” announced the redman proudly. “Oklahoma and Kansas were the home of the Kiowas, the Pawnees and the Comanches. And you see oil has been found here. In Texas, where the big oil fields are, once roved Wichitas. The Dakotas, some tribes of which were the Biloxi, the Opelousas and the Pascagoulas, lived on the gulf plains of Louisiana. Out in southern California, where the oil wells now flow, the Yokut Indians once owned the land. They tell me that where oil had been discovered in Central America, petroleum seeps to the surface of the land where once the Indian tribes were found.”
“Did the Indians use the oil?” asked Bob. He, like Betty, was fascinated with the musical names of the mysterious tribes as they rolled easily from the Kiowa’s tongue.
“Not as the white man does,” was the answer. “The Senecas skimmed the streams for oil and sometimes spread blankets over the water till they were heavy with the oil. They used oil for cuts and burns and were famed for their skill in removing the water from the oil by boiling. Dances and religious rites were observed with the aid of oil. The Siouan Indians, who lived in West Virginia and Virginia, knew, too, of natural gas. They tossed in burning brands and watched the flames leap up from pits they themselves had dug.
“You will find,” the Indian continued, evidently approving of the rapt attention of his audience, “many wells now owned by Indians and leased to white-men companies. The Osage have big holdings. They are reservation Indians, mostly—perhaps they can not help that. I must go to the plowing.”
He gathered up his harness and went off to the field, and Bob and Betty resumed their explorations, talking about him with interest. Their tour of the shabby outbuildings was soon completed, and just in time for a huge bell rung vigorously announced that dinner was on the table.
That afternoon they found Grandma Watterby braiding rugs under the one large tree in the side yard, and she welcomed them warmly.
“I was just wishing for some one to talk to,” she said cheerfully. “Can’t you sit a while? There isn’t much for young ’uns to do, and I says to your uncle it was a good thing there was two of you—at least you can talk.”
“What lovely rugs!” exclaimed Betty, examining the old woman’s work. “See, Bob, they’re braided, just like the colonial rag rugs you see in pictures. Can’t I do some?”
“Sure you can braid,” said the old woman. “It’s easy. I’ll show you, and then I’ll sew some while you braid.”
“Let me braid, too,” urged Bob. “My fingers aren’t all thumbs, if I am a boy.”
“Well now,” fluttered Grandma Watterby, pleased as could be, “I don’t know when I’ve had somebody give me a lift. Working all by yourself is tedious-like, and Emma don’t get a minute to set down. My brother used to make lots of mats to sell; he could braid ’em tighter than I can.”
She showed Betty how to braid and then started Bob on three strips. Then she took up the sewing of strips already braided.
“We were talking to the Indian this morning,” said Betty idly. “He told us a lot about Indians—how wherever they have been oil has been discovered. Does he really know?”
“Ki has been to Government school, and knows a heap,” nodded Grandma Watterby. “What he tells you’s likely to be so. I don’t rightly know myself about what they have to do with the oil, but Will was saying only the other night that the Osage Indians have been paid millions of dollars within the last few years.”
Her keen old eyes were sparkling, and she was sewing with the quick, darting motion that they soon learned was characteristic of everything she did. She must be very old, Bob decided, watching her shriveled hands, knotted by rheumatism, and the idea of age put another thought into his head.
“Mr. Gordon said you’d lived on this farm for sixty years, Grandma,” the boy said suddenly. It had been explained to them that the old lady liked every one to use that title. “You must know ’most every one in the neighborhood.”
“Fred Watterby brought me here the day we were married,” the old woman replied, letting her sewing fall into her lap. “Sixty years ago come next October. I was married on my seventeenth birthday.”
She sat in a little reverie, and Bob and Betty braided quietly, unwilling to disturb her, although the same question was in their minds. Then Grandma Watterby took up her sewing with a sigh, and the spell was broken.
“Know everybody in the neighborhood?” she echoed Bob’s statement. “Yes, I used to. But with so many moving in and such a lot of oil folks, why, there’s days when I don’t see a rig pass the house I know.”
Betty and Bob spoke simultaneously.
“Do you know any one named Saunders?” they chorused.
CHAPTER X
BOB LEARNS SOMETHING
Grandma Watterby considered gravely.
“Saunders? Saunders?” she repeated reflectively, while Betty squeezed Bob’s arm in an agony of hopeful excitement. “Seems to me—now wait a minute, and don’t hurry me. When you hurry me, I get mixed in my mind.”
Betty and Bob waited in respectful silence. The old woman rubbed her forehead fretfully, but gradually her expression cleared.
“There was a Saunders family,” she murmured, half to herself. “Three girls, wasn’t there—or was it four? No, three, and only one of ’em married. What was her name—Faith? Yes, that’s it, Faith. A pretty girl she was, with eyes as blue as a lake and ripply hair she wore in a big knot. I always did want to see that hair d
own her back, and one day I told her so.
“‘How long is it, Faith?’ I asked her. ‘When I was a girl we wore our hair down our backs in a braid and was thankful to our Creator for the blessing of a heavy head of hair.’
“Faith laughed and laughed. I can see her now; she had a funny way of crinkling up her eyes when she laughed.
“‘I’ll take it down for you, Mrs. Watterby,’ she says; and, my land, if she didn’t pull out every pin and let her hair tumble down her back. It was a foot below her waist, too. I never saw such a head o’ hair.”
Bob looked up at the old woman with shining eyes.
“That was my mother,” he said quietly.
“Your mother!” Grandma Watterby’s tone was startled. Then her face broke into a wrinkled smile.
“Well, now, ain’t I stupid?” she demanded eagerly. “My head isn’t what it used to be. Course you are Faith Saunders’ son. She married David Henderson, a likely young carpenter. Dear, dear, to think you’re Faith’s boy. My, wouldn’t your grandma have been proud to see you!”
“Did you know her?” asked Bob hungrily. Deprived of kin for so many years, even the claim to relatives, he was pathetically starved for the details taken for granted by the average boy.
“Your grandpa and your grandma,” pronounced Grandma Watterby, “died ’bout a year after your ma was married. I guess they never saw you. Your aunties was all of twenty years older than she was. Your ma was the youngest of a large family of children, but they all died babies ’cept the two oldest and the youngest. Funny wasn’t it?”
Betty waved her braiding wildly.
“Bob was told he had two aunts,” she cried excitedly. “They’re still living, aren’t they, Grandma Watterby? Do they live near here?”
“I dunno whether they’re living or not,” said the old woman cautiously. “Seems like I would ’a’ heard if they had died, but mebbe not. I don’t go out much any more, and Emma’s no hand for news. Mebbe they died. I ain’t heard a word ’bout the Saunders family for years and years. Where’s your father, boy?”
“He died,” said Bob simply. “He was killed in a railroad wreck, and I guess my mother nearly lost her mind. They found her wandering around the country, with only her wedding certificate and a few other papers in a little tin box. And she was sent to the poorhouse. That night I was born, and she died.”
“Dear! dear!” mourned Grandma Watterby, a mist gathering on her spectacles. “Poor, pretty Faith Saunders! In the poorhouse! The Saunders was never what you might call rich, but I guess none of ’em ever saw the inside of the almshouse. And David Henderson was as fine a young man as you’d want to see. When Faith married him and he took her away from here, folks thought they’d go far in the world. I wonder if Hope and Charity ever tried to find out what became of her?”
“Hope and Charity?” repeated Bob. “Are those my aunts?”
“Yes, Hope and Charity Saunders—they was twins,” said the old lady. “Nice girls, too; and they thought everything of Faith. She was so much younger and so pretty, and they were like mothers to her. And she died in the poorhouse! Why didn’t they send her baby back to the girls? They’d ’a’ taken care of you and brought you up like their own.”
Bob explained that his mother’s mental condition had baffled the endeavors of the authorities to get information from her regarding her home and friends, and that she had evidently walked so many miles from the scene of the wreck that no attempt was made to identify his father’s body. A baby was no novelty in the poorhouse, and no one was greatly interested in establishing a circle of relatives for him, and, except for a happy coincidence, he might have remained in ignorance of his mother’s people all his life.
“I must find out where my aunts live,” he concluded. “I overheard some chaps on the train talking about the Saunders place, and Betty and I decided that that must be the homestead farm. They may not live there now, but surely whoever does, could give me a clue. Do you know of a place so called around here? Or would Mr. Watterby?”
“I don’t know where the Saunders place is,” replied Grandma Watterby, genuinely troubled. “Will wouldn’t know, ’cause he’s only farmed here five years, having his own place till his pa died. If I recollect right, the Saunders didn’t live round here, not right round here, that is. Let’s see, it’s all of fifteen years since Faith was married. I lost sight of the girls after she left, and they stopped driving in to see us. Where was their place? I know I went to old Mrs. Saunders’ funeral. Well, anyway, I got this much straight—there was three hills right back of the house. I’d know ’em if I saw ’em in Japan—them three hills! You watch for ’em, boy, and when you lay eyes on ’em you’ll know you’ve found the Saunders place!”
And that was the most definite direction Bob could hope for. Grandma Watterby had the weight of years upon her, and she could not remember the road that led to the farm she had often visited. Though in the days that followed she recollected various bits of information about Bob’s mother and her life as a girl, to which he listened eagerly, she was utterly unable to locate the farm. She kept mentioning the three hills, however, and her son, overhearing, smiled a little.
“Mother never did pay much attention to roads and like-a-that,” he commented dryly. “She always found her way around like the Babes in the Wood—by remembering something she had passed coming over.”
The Watterby place was a curious mixture of primitive farming methods, ranching tactics, and Indian folklore, with a sprinkling of furtherest East and West for good measure. Will Watterby attributed his cosmopolitan plan of work to the influence of the ever-changing hired man.
“They come and they go, mostly go,” he was fond of saying. “It’s easier for me to do the hired man’s way, ’cause I can’t go off when things don’t suit me. Our place seems to be a half-way station for all the tramps in creation. I reckon they get off at Flame City, and, headed east or west, have to earn the money for the rest of their trip. Well, anyway, I don’t believe in being narrow; if a man can show me a better way to do a job, I’m willing to be shown.”
“I simply have to have a clean middy blouse to wear to-morrow when Uncle Dick gets back,” Betty confided to Bob. “And I don’t intend to let Mrs. Watterby wash and iron it for me. Can’t you fix me a tub of water somewhere out in the barn? I’ll do it myself and spread it on the grass to dry. Then, when she’s getting supper, I can heat an iron and press it.”
Bob was willing; indeed he needed clean collars himself, and had reached the decision that there was only one way to get them. Inquiry had established the fact that there was no laundry in Flame City, and the genus washwoman was practically unknown.
Betty went in to get her middy blouse, and Bob pumped pail after pail of water and carried it to the barn. One pump supplied the whole farm, house and barns. The two cows, three horses, and the pigs and chickens were watered thrice daily by the patient Ki.
Cold water was not the only difficulty Betty encountered when she came to the actual washing. The soap would not lather, and a thick white scum formed on the water when she tried to churn up a suds.
“Hard,” said Bob laconically. “Got to have something to put in to soften it. Borax is good; know where there is any?”
Betty remembered having seen a box of borax on the kitchen shelf, and Bob volunteered to go for it. When he returned with it, he brought the news that there was a peddler at the back door with a bewildering “assortment of everything,” Bob said.
“Put a lot of this in,” he directed, handing the box to Betty, who obediently shook in half the contents. “Now we’ll put the stuff to soak, and go and look at this fellow’s stuff. When you come back to wash, all you’ll have to do will be to rinse ’em out and put them out to dry.”
This sounded plausible, and the middy blouse and collars were left to soak themselves clean.
The peddler proved to have a horse and wagon, and he carried dress goods, notions, kitchen wear, books, stationery and candy. Bob and Betty had never
seen a wagon fitted up like this, and they thought it far better than a store.
“I might buy that dotted swiss shirtwaist,” whispered Betty, as Mrs. Watterby ordered five yards of apron gingham measured off. “My middy blouse might not dry in time.”
“All right. And I’ll get a clean collar,” agreed Bob. “These aren’t much and I suppose they’re too cheap to last long, but at any rate they’re clean.”
The peddler drove on at last, and then Bob and Betty hurried back to their washing. Alas, the tub had disappeared. At supper that night, Mrs. Watterby had missed it and demanded of her husband if he had seen it.
“Sure, I had Ki spraying the hen house this afternoon,” Watterby rejoined. “Thought you’d mixed the soapsuds and washing soda for him. It was standing in the barn.”
Betty explained. Of her blouse and Bob’s collars, there remained a few ragged shreds, for she had poured enough washing powder in to eat the fabric full of holes. She took her loss good-naturedly and was thankful she had the new blouse to wear.
Uncle Dick, when he heard the story, went into gales of laughter.
“Tough luck, Kitten,” he comforted her. “We’ll go to see an oil fire this afternoon and that’ll take your mind off your troubles.”
CHAPTER XI
AN OIL FIRE
Mr. Gordon had arrived the night of the disastrous laundry experiment, and made his announcement at the supper table.
“An oil fire!” ejaculated Betty. “Where is it? Won’t it burn the offices and houses? Perhaps they’ll have it put out before we get there!”
Mr. Gordon did not seem to be at all excited, and continued to eat his supper placidly. He looked tired, and he later admitted that he had slept little the night before, having spent the time discussing ways of putting out the fire with the well foreman.
“No, we’ll get to it in plenty of time in the morning,” he assured his niece. “An oil fire is less dangerous than expensive, my dear. We’ve got a man coming up from beyond Tippewa with a sand blast on the first train. Telegraphed for him tonight. It will cost fifteen hundred dollars to put the fire out, but it’s worth it.”
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